An Outsourcing Reading List

As U.S. unemployment remains high, and Indian outsourcers face accusations of flouting U.S. laws, this seems as good a time as any to step back a bit from the day-to-day “They’ve taken our jobs” or “No they haven’t” reporting on outsourcing.

Courtesy Griffin Press

A screengrab of the cover of the book, ‘Confessions of a Call Center Gal.’

One criticism of Andrew Marantz’s recent first-person account in Mother Jones of cultural training at an Indian call center, said: “The unacknowledged irony is that in this globalized world, it’s Westerners…that largely define for international culture what it means to be an Indian call center agent.”

Although it’s true that more of the cultural production around call centers appears to come out of the U.S. than out of India—there are two crime novels called “Outsourced” that both revolve around the effects of downsizing on Americans—we’ve tried to put together a list, both fiction and non-fiction, that offers a sense of the perceptions from both ends of the telephone:

Advertisement

1. “One Night @ the Call Center”: Many critics, both in India and overseas, weren’t so keen on this fictional equivalent of a pop song, but its author Chetan Bhagat does capture a sense of what it must be like to be young and in your first job in this industry—at least the thousands of young Indians who bought it and love it seem to think so. It’s worth a read but it suffers from the same flaw as Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones”—it, or perhaps the author, finds God halfway through. It was published in the U.S. in 2007 but many readers there didn’t care for the portrayal of Americans in the novel.

2. “Working the Night Shift: Women in India’s Call Center Industry”: Women in the call center industry have often been in the spotlight because their late working hours are so unusual in India—and in some cases female call center workers have been the victims of brutal attacks—and because of the mythology around call centers as a “Western” space where different social and sexual morés prevail. “Feminist geographer” Reena Patel looks at the reality in this 2010 book.

3. “Outsourced“: In Dave Zeltserman’s 2011 crime novel, which probably also falls into the category of “2008 downturn” fiction, laid-off software engineers decide to rob a bank. A key plot point: They intend to take advantage of a flaw in the bank’s security software code, which was (surprise, surprise) written by programmers in India. The flaw? The security software shuts down for half an hour periodically.

4. “Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing Is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves“: Sociologist Shehzad Nadeem’s 2011 exploration of work culture at Indian call centers has been well reviewed in the U.S. University of California, San Diego, sociology professor John Skrentny called it “essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of work and culture in a global age.” Mr. Nadeem, who teaches sociology at the City University of New York, doesn’t seem to much care for the cultural training adopted by call centers. In a Guardian article that Mr. Nadeem wrote about accent neutralization, he uses a decidedly non-neutral term for call center workers: “cyber-coolies.” Read an excerpt.

5. “Confessions of a Call Center Gal”: A chick-lit approach to the call center. But the call center genre usually involves around East-West conflict, and that’s where this book is a reminder that the call center predates globalization and outsourcing. This call center is located in Idaho. Reading it back-to-back with Mr. Bhagat’s book might offer a sense of the extent to which the mutual hostility call center workers and clients feel is rooted in culture clashes, versus the often frustrating-in-itself experience of customer service.

About India Real Time

India Real Time offers analysis and insights into the broad range of developments in business, markets, the economy, politics, culture, sports, and entertainment that take place every single day in the world’s largest democracy. Regular posts from Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires reporters around the country provide a unique take on the main stories in the news, shed light on what else mattered and why, and give global readers a snapshot of what Indians have been talking about all week. You can contact the editors at indiarealtime(at)wsj(dot)com.